Intellivore - Diane Duane [66]
How many lives had it taken, over all the long tale of years? It knew; that was the horrible thing. It could number every one. It kept them. Maybe not the energy itself; that was long consumed—that undetectable effluvium from which it derived, not energy, but pleasure. And their memories, their pain, it ate that, too. And it kept the memory of that pain, as a gourmet will keep labels from wine bottles in a book, and take the book out every now and then to look at the labels and say, “That was a nice one.”
For if there was one thing the intellivore had not been in a long time, that was alive. Once, he suddenly knew, it had been many—telepathically connected, a long time ago. Not exactly a hive mind, not exactly a clone group, but an old species of many millions, their minds partly joined, partly independent.
They had begun to die as a species, becoming unable to reproduce. Some of them did not want the species to die, at any price; that was how their new turn of life had started, in the earliest times … the fear and rage of some of them infecting the whole species slowly, over time.
They had an extraordinary technology, it was true. While wandering down the byroads of that technology, one of them least pleased with the option of seeing both himself and then his species pass away discovered something—a slightly new version of a legend occurring on many planets: that by devouring the energy of others’ minds, one could trick one’s own mind out of the knowledge of its own mortality. The mind forgets; only the body needs to be convinced, then, that life will go on forever.
The members of that old species who first used this technique found out what to do. But first, while the new science was still being developed, they preyed on one another; and when that became a danger, they preyed on other species. They went out in ships for the hunt. That was a mistake, for other species followed them home, and wrought such revenge on their world that it was considered unwise to try that again for a while. They kept quiet, and preyed on one another as they had been doing—such behavior had settled itself into their culture as permissible now, even respectable. Then someone found the next step in their evolution.
They would build a world. They would live on it, and move it as their whim pleased them. They would go where they liked, and take what they liked. And if anyone became difficult, tried to fight them, then they would simply withdraw for a little while, taking themselves away off into the darkness. Then as now, in space, distance was the best defense.
They built the planet. It was the work of a thousand years. They built matrices that would hold their disembodied intelligences safe and immortal. As long as there was power at the heart of their world, they would continue … and they made sure that they had a power source that would never fail them. Finally, they poured themselves into the matrices they had prepared, took up residence, and went forward into the night, seeking whom they might devour.
There were already many fewer of the intellivores than there had been a thousand years previously. All the weak of the species had been devoured. The minds left swimming in the formlessness of the matrix inside their world were the hungriest, the cleverest, the ones most in love with their own lives and the taste of others’ minds and thoughts—not merely to experience but to consume. They did not stop improving their world, once they were out among the stars; they devised the field that automated and powered the business of the devouring.
From world to world they went, in that other galaxy from which they originated. They gourmandized there for millennia. And when there was no life left there, they set out into the darkness. They had the power they needed to survive, and the memory of many minds that they had stripped. But new thought, fresh life, was sweeter, and they looked forward patiently to the patch of light before them. They watched it develop into a spiral as they approached, and the